My Peer Review of Your Paper (A Parody)

I am going to start out with a summary of your paper and a few complimentary remarks. Unfortunately for you, I am a PhD student who just went ABD and is now in the process of writing a dissertation chapter that encompasses everything tangentially related to your topic. It will eventually be thrown away for something more sane, but I digress.

While this appears to be a peer review, it is in fact a game of Battleship. I will make a series of remarks A-2, B-12 etc. in the hopes that i can somehow sink the battleships which are your critical review, theoretical framework, sampling decisions, methodology, analysis and conclusions. In anticipation of this sinking, I will be a little bit nice this time in hopes that karma will extend this favor to me at some time in this process. For this reason, I recommend that your paper be returned with a request for major revisions.

Unfortunately, your theoretical framework does not encompass all aspects of the ever-changing and oft-debated discipline. Worse, it does not include some of my very favorite authors. You should include many more authors and especially my favorites in order to make your contributions to a fairly narrow, but relevant aspect of the field much less clear. The world is complex, my friend, therefore all straight-forward positivistic experiments much include at least one paragraph on postmodern social theory.

Your critical review of the literature is even worse than your theoretical framework. There are at least twenty authors who have said the exact opposite of “this thing that you referenced in your paper” and you need to deal with each in turn, even though they come from popularly tweeted blog posts of something some famous academics wrote one night when they were obviously either bored or very drunk. I also have written a few drunken posts on the topic that I will not mention here, but they are popular enough that if you google the appropriate terms you will find them pretty quickly. Unfortunately, I do not have any published works you can refer to, but that’s only because they are all in revisions themselves.

I don’t really understand how you came to select the cases you did. Please insert a few lines of bullshit that justify why people become interested in a research topic to the point that they wish to write about it. I kind of want to know why myself.

You elected to use some methodology that i do not completely understand myself. Good for you! If I don’t understand it, it must be pretty cutting edge. But, I am pretty sure that if I did the same thing with my own cutting edge methodologies, I would come up with fairly different results. This likely has nothing to do with your analysis, but instead with the way I treat research like a Yahtzee game. You see, whenever I get some great data, I shake it up a few times until I get a Yahtzee! Once I see that Yahtzee, I come up with a great research question. Like this: How many dice are showing the exact same number? Hypothesis 0: not 5. Hypothesis 1: 5. Result: Yahtzee! (otherwise, I wouldn’t bother to write up the results.) Either way, choose a different methodology that is closer to the way I like to study problems.

I am not sure that your analysis follows from your theoretical framework. This makes sense because if you were going to use the theoretical framework in the way it was intended, it would just be duplicating the rather mundane and old methods of people who have already got their first academic job and have received promotion and tenure — not to mention tons of grant money to now do all that research work properly. This will not do. Your first mistake was trying to be both cutting edge and working from the foundations of a discipline. If I can’t sink you on one side, I will definitely sink you on the other.

Your conclusions are adequate of course, because we all know that attacking a conclusion is petty. You are free to speculate away all you want so long as you are sure to include the need for further research. Of course, that need would be subsided if people actually began to accept my papers, but there I go again digressing on the issue.

I noticed a number of minor typing and grammar errors. Hopefully these will not matter as the primary goal here is that this paper never makes it to the final proof stage.

Also, I thought I’d include a little bit of speculation here at the end because I am kind of on a roll. In fact, if it weren’t a complete violation of the rules of peer review, I think I’d want to publish this myself. I think it could become Internet gold.

P.S. I may still be drunk.

P.P.S. In my opinion Rusty Nails go very well with revisions. If you have no Drambuie, just add lime juice and marachino cherries and make a Whiskey Sour instead.